The images you repurpose come from recognizable pop culture, taken from online platforms, news stories, magazines, and cult movies. Through a process of appropriation, these images have become part of your vocabulary. What are the criteria that guide your choice in selecting images to represent? How do you research the images?
The first step is to save all the images that captured my attention. I actually do this with my phone, by taking original photos, screenshots, photographing images in archives, books, magazines, or simply download- ing them. It might take quite some time before I decide to paint, draw, or sculpt them. There is obviously an extremely technical aspect to this process, and that plays a significant role in considering the image. Practical considerations also come into play frequently due to the time involved. But essentially, if I can envision a particular image resonating with the present moment, I will undertake the process of bringing it to life.
Your work is immensely vast and encompasses a range of different techniques: from drawings to writing, from film to sculpture. The nature of your approach suggests a deep desire to find meaning outside the digital world, what could it be?
I grew up with a great artist, my grandfather, Stuart Robles de Medina, who was incredibly versatile in his abilities. There’s something about his agility and ease in that versatility that made a huge impression on my young mind, even when considering the fundamental nature of art. It’s all about the Bauhaus movement; I believe it triggered the sense that the value of art lies in a kind of original innovation that occurs not only within a single work but especially between works. I know it might sound old-fashioned, but I think these ideas have been undervalued due to the workings of the art market and careerism. After ten years of emerging as an artist, it feels like a genuine rebellion to work embodying this rhetoric, which is the thing that most deeply belongs to me.
In your works you often extract the image from its original frame, shifting the emphasis to the subject represented. These subjects are always drawn in graphite technique that leads you to achieve a monochromatic result in black and white. To what is this choice due? What is your relationship with materials and painting techniques?
I enjoyed working in drawing for a long time, especially graphite drawing, as it scratched a kind of obsessive itch of mine. I think there’s an emotional depth and intimacy you can reach with graphite, that’s extremely slow and layered, but very rewarding in the end. But I found at the beginning of the pandemic, that this way of working was no longer sustainable and became too suffocating, and it took three years actually before I would work in drawing again which speaks to the fatigue I felt. There’s a sort of choreographic connection between writing and drawing, which I romanticize as well. However, when it comes to the use of black and white, I believe it’s related to the initial questions; you know, I’m not particularly committed to any specific approach.
In your latest work you translate a photograph into a drawing, which is then photographed and transformed back into a new drawing or sculpture. It is a process that leads you to work on the original source, providing an alternative view of the original and at the same time creating new work. This dialogical process, then, what kind of feeling does it lead you to with the initial and the final image, which is represented to us?
I think there are parallels here, like the relationship between a composer and a DJ. Within my methodology, I can be either and be both at the same time.